This is a brilliant move by Marissa Mayer. She knows from experience that having the best of the best (not only in engineering- but also in design, marketing, etc.) is necessary for your success in tech. Large tech companies depend on their employee's pet ideas and projects, the fact that they might be well known in some niche for some open source project or blog, and so on. In a way, if you're a large company that needs to constantly be on top of the latest trends and technologies (because if you're not, the same thing happens to you as happened to Myspace), you're no different than YCombinator - except that instead of wanting your recruits to start their startup, you want them to run a project for you internally (all of the famous Google projects that originated from 20% projects could have easily been startups of their own).
Through these actions and posts, shes's showing how cool and fun Yahoo! is. Look, the CEO works on weekends with a small skunkworks team on designing logos, and nerds out on the subtle details like any cool designer would do.
This is all about making Yahoo! a desirable place to work at again. I'm receiving way more emails from Yahoo! recruiters these days than Google or Apple recruiters, and they all have a common tone: "check us out, we're fun!".
Similarly, all the small startup acquisitions have 2 goals: poach for talent, and get Techcrunch, HN, Engadget, etc. to talk about Yahoo. (the big acquisition we all talked about was about receiving a mature project internally as a way to make up for lost time)
Of course it's not just this that will bring Yahoo! to victory, but those little things show how much strategy there is in Mayer's execution.
EDIT: finally was in a situation where I could watch the video, and I only feel stronger about my point. Listen to the music (some dubstep/ibiza dance/feel good summer hit hybrid) - this is clearly destined to appeal to the 21 year old Stanford student looking for a new job, not the guy on HN who will criticize anything that makes it to the front page.
Her experience and micromanagement apparently produced a logo that looks like it belongs on a web portal framed by IE6's forward thinking UI and appears to have been designed by someone who just figured out that illustrator could do 3d effects.
So, so much for making users think the company has moved beyond its stagnant products. Which in a lot of ways it has, look at the Yahoo weather app for Android, the design is modern and integrates one of Yahoo's rather under leveraged properties: flickr. That was nice design.
As to signals to the best of the best, this blog post confirms both that she will micro manager you and do design by committee simultaneously (a dubious distinction I don't think even Steve Balmer could achieve). And that's the signal if they like the logo.
Micromanagement is a management style, not something you do over a weekend. Saying that the CEO micro manages because she's deeply involved with the evolution of her company's brand is a bit silly.
Someone said that Steve Jobs wasn't a micromanager, only a great manager obsessed with details. I guess he should have stayed in his kitchen making sandwiches for his four kids.
Were you implying that my criticism of Mayer was akin to saying she should have stayed in the kitchen or were you suggesting we should cut her some slack because no doubt some asshole somewhere has said sexist shit like that?
For what it's worth Straw-man Steven Jobs --- the mascot of Apple and God design --- is said to have obsessed over details when telling people their designs were shit and needed to be redone. As far as I am aware, the Steve Jobs of legend didn't actually sit down and do design work himself.
Micro management is a style and I agree one weekend work session isn't enough to say she is a micro manager, but her blog post is certainly enough to say she micro managed the logo design and people will extrapolate (especially since she was criticism for micro-managment while at Google). Unless of course the story that the logo was designed primarily over a weekend isn't true and/or she wasn't as involved as she said she was. I don't think those are likely or better alternatives.
> Micromanagement is a management style, not something you do over a weekend.
Micromanagement is a bad management style to apply with creative teams. It breaks the creative flow, clouds judgement of quality and adds external pressure to a process that depends on consistent internal drive. You can micromanage accountants, SAP programmers and clerks, but if people like those in design teams or R&D are focused on quality, micromanaging them quickly begins to resemble herding cats.
> Someone said that Steve Jobs wasn't a micromanager, only a great manager obsessed with details.
Someone said that about Steve Jobs, and his work was of a very different nature. Articulating the concept of personal computing into a product is very much unlike the process of designing the logo, even if they are superficially similar.
PG commented about Jobs yesterday re: Google compose. Basically, he argues Steve Jobs is an anomaly in that he can micromanage design without breaking it.
If he wasn't already dead, seeing this logo and reading this post about the CEO and intern with their hands on an Illustrator file would probably give Steve Jobs a stroke.
The fact that you have to look closely is a problem. The details only barely show up on their website on my 13inch macbook and I at least am left semi-straining to actually resolve the logo completely. It looks to me like someone designed a logo with little regard to how it would be primely seen by non employees --- I'm sure it looks better on a giant sign out front.
It's a straight up bad design. It's the logo of a massive company, there is no room for emotion or being "bitter". They have a lot of man power, and produced this, it's sub par. It's not pleasing to the eye, it's sharp and 3d-ish. You'd get something better by throwing $500 towards 99 designs.
A logo should look great on a massive banner as well as my tiny retina screen. Right now, when it's smaller, the bevels and shadows/jaggedness of the logo are very off putting, not something I'm pleased to look at.
>> "The bevel is bad" is not a very good argument, either.
While I don't like the logo at all, I have to agree with this.
Yahoo's logo isn't designed for logo and design aficionados, it's designed so that the masses can easily associate the shapes and colors of the logo with the company (which leaves me to wonder why they fixed something that isn't really broken). Most people don't think much about the logo beyond that.
The exercise of rebranding itself is just a PR stunt to tell the world that Yahoo's not the old Yahoo.
Traditional (i.e. Paul Rand era) logo design was trying to distill a company down to a minimal essence. Having bevels leaves in a decorative element that makes in non-minimal. That it should look good in 1 color is fundamental to traditional logo design.
Yes, but it is going to be used on the screen 99% of the time, you say. But people who violate that rule end up with logos that are just a little bit tacky to a graphic designer.
It should be noted that it was under this individual's reign at Google that the notorious 41 tints of blue occurred[1], which was clearly an indicator of abject ineptitude regarding art and design.
The comment about Illustrator was cringe worthy. The idea that someone is so filled with hubris regarding a field well outside their domain has the wafts of Denning - Krugerism pluming out.
This is a great point. When we think of Google, we think of a lot of other things before the logo (at least I do).
The effort of moving the conversation further with this marketing is impressive.. How many more "30 days" type of marketing initiatives will this create?
I couldn't disagree more. To me, the new logo screams "design by committee". Its only virtue is that it addresses the worst flaws of the old logo. If we are to believe that how a company treats its logo is a reflection how it acts in all other regards (dubious at best), this would signal to a potential employee that Yahoo is an overly-cautious company that rejects big-picture rethinking and will only take on incremental adjustments to the status quo. A place where you cannot do your best work because you need to get buy in from 15 stakeholders for any significant change, and mediocre work that doesn't step on anyone's toes is the path to success.
Me, I think that a logo is just a logo, and that a logo (and even a logo design process) is almost completely orthogonal to a company's ability to recruit and retain talent.
> So, one weekend this summer, I rolled up my sleeves and dove into the trenches with our logo design team: Bob Stohrer, Marc DeBartolomeis, Russ Khaydarov, and our intern Max Ma. We spent the majority of Saturday and Sunday designing the logo from start to finish, and we had a ton of fun weighing every minute detail.
The Yahoo! logotype was important enough to involve the CEO of a $25B company, and frivolous enough to knock out in a weekend.
>The Yahoo! logotype was important enough to involve the CEO of a $25B company, and frivolous enough to knock out in a weekend.
I think that combination is probably accurate, but I don't think that is a bad thing. Mayer knows that something like this isn't really in the job description of a CEO. They don't pay her the big bucks to play around in Illustrator and it isn't a efficient use of her work day. But this is something she is interested in and something she thinks is important to the new image of Yahoo. So she dedicates a weekend (as off the clock as a Fortune 500 CEO can be?) to meet with the design team and get the work done. The move actually sounds pretty calculated and smart to me. It shows that she both knows her roll in the company but will still pay attention to the details.
Children are surprisingly capable of not falling over dead or turning into monsters even if their parents spend a little time pursuing other interests now and then, you know.
Also, be honest: Would that thought have even occured to you if Yahoo! had a male CEO? If not, why not?
The thought occurred to a lot of folks when Steve Jobs said he had a biography done "so his kids would know him". A few of them (eg. Jeff Atwood) even changed their behavior as a result.
Not only do they not die or turn into monsters, but it's also an important lesson on how to explore one's interest to occupy oneself!
I also wanted to mention the idea of including your children in your interests so they get to know you and spend time with you (and you get to do something you love!), but there was no good seguefor that.
Indeed! In my early childhood I had the great fortune that my parents' workplace was located next door to our family home, so I got to observe and bother them at work, as well as help out within my limited abilities (they ran a small engineering company, so e.g. folding blueprints and stuffing them into big paper envelopes). That taught me a lot of valuable lessons about life and work (perhaps not always in the moment, but it was at times useful to go back to those memories later in life, anyway), and it was great to feel a little in the loop, so it also taught me something about the value of communicating with your loved ones. If they had a rough week I would know first-hand and cut them a little slack for not having the spare capacity to deal with me being a brat :).
According to Wikipedia her kid is less than 1 year old. It's tricky to involve them in your interests at that age :)
I can just about get my 5 year old interested, but my 2 year old is more keen on pressing the off button on my laptop.
It's far worse. It's faux-design-by-math. There's no rational schema behind the arcs and guides scattered through that obnoxious little video; instead they represent a post-facto attempt to justify choices that are either default (directly from the font on which the logo is based) or arbitrary by cloaking them in the visual trappings of "design". It's the sort of thing I expect to see in the first crit of a sophomore typography class, not in a professional context.
I have to agree. In addition, most of the features of the logo she raves about are not visible in the default (and very pixelated) state on the home page.
In a design world that seems to be shifting to high-resolution, flat design, this seems like an odd step backward.
Unfortunately, to me her post says different things:
* "I work on weekends." (With a hint of "Just saying...").
* Designed in only two days.
* This was personal. Talking about her love for design and "most of all" Illustrator (!?) says "It's at least partly about me."
* Mixed messages. "We didn’t want to have any straight lines in the logo." -- yet the logo ended up with a ton of essentially straight lines.
And worst of all, the new logo seems to throw out too much of the old brand, misunderstand modern design trends and logo portability (logos with depth still need to be interesting when flat), and try too hard to have weight and impact without really achieving it. For example, the saturation of the purple has been pumped up till it almost hurts your eyes. Like TV sets at Best Buy, it's attention grabbing, but it's not desirable in the long term.
In some ways, but I think Yahoo! has essentially proven their brand is so weak that it can be represented by a new poorly thought out design every day and, well, no-one cares.
If Apple, McDonald's or Coca Cola did something similar, they'd be committing brand suicide and attracting a lot of flak, but with Yahoo it's just "Oh well, another new Yahoo logo, who cares?"
> She knows from experience that having the best of the best is necessary for your success in tech
This is simply not true. There is a metric ton of examples of "success in tech" WITHOUT "having the best of the best". Microsoft would be the prime example. Twitter - another.
That's now. Look back to their FailWhale period. They certainly didn't have "best of the best", yet they did succeed. Though I guess you can count Arrington's constant cheer-leading as the best of marketing... but it'd still be a stretch.
> Why do you think Spolsky started his career there right out of college?
Because of their stock option program, why else. But that's irrelevant.
Microsoft did not succeed because they had "best of the best", but because of their underhanded sales and customer entrapment tactics.
Point being the company don't need "best of the best" to succeed. It's often sufficient, but it's certainly not necessary.
Solid teams and people get to be named solid only after they perform.
You are looking at those companies after they won, but when they started and with no proven credentials against them I doubt you would have the same view about them then.
When I think about software I think about C++. Microsoft's core teams are built from the best of the best. For example their compiler and even some Windows internals (somebody should tell Linus about how a driver works :-) ).
Its the other thousands on the periphery that are approaching mediocrity. Although still quite profitable.
If MS was a Java fun house like Yahoo, they would have tanked long ago.
I couldn't agree more. What I feel a lot of people are missing here is that Marissa's making Yahoo a place where good engineers want to work: where empowered smart people can make a difference in a scrappy way.
> Through these actions and posts, shes's showing how cool and fun Yahoo! is. Look, the CEO works on weekends with a small skunkworks team on designing logos, and nerds out on the subtle details like any cool designer would do.
Through these actions and posts, she looks like someone I wouldn't want to work with, or for.
I avoid people who claim "I am not X, but I know enough to be dangerous" like the plague they are. I've had my share of "I am not an engineer, but I know enough to be dangerous"; they're the people who think you used two decoupling caps in parallel because you couldn't find one with the right value, or who are always there to help you with an obvious and useless tip when you're debugging a program -- and then you spend five minutes explaining them why they're not even close to the problem (partly because they used some words that mean something different than what they thought they mean). And take another fifteen to gather back your focus, as a bonus.
Second, if I had some work to do, the last thing I'd want is the CEO in my room. Yahoo looks like a big company, don't they have some CEO-ing to do? When you decide you want to make a career out of pushing papers and borderline lying to investors, stick to it.
Third, having the CEO bug you and working weekends is a really low, indecent form of manipulation. Someone who's designs stuff for Yahoo is probably experienced enough to have gone past the "I have to work weekends to impress my boss and jumpstart my career" phase. The dudes probably had families to spend time with (or bars to hit and get drunk over the grudge of their loneliness, whatever). Let them go home, you can brag to the press about what a workaholic culture your company has without actually keeping your employees at work over the weekend.
Sure, if the atmosphere is fun enough, it may seem like you're having fun and playing, but this doesn't avoid the burnout, it just makes its settling less painful.
> finally was in a situation where I could watch the video, and I only feel stronger about my point. Listen to the music (some dubstep/ibiza dance/feel good summer hit hybrid) - this is clearly destined to appeal to the 21 year old Stanford student looking for a new job, not the guy on HN who will criticize anything that makes it to the front page.
This is clearly destined to appeal to the ambitious, 21-year hipster who wants to be a corporate drone but with style, you know, like he's not a corporate drone. Job-desperate, loan-starved young graduates who want to subscribe to the 70 hours a week -- but oh so fun -- culture.
I don't think they are to be condemned (we were all pretty stupid when we were 21), but someone who perpetuates this culture isn't to be admired and certainly not made an example of, not among tech professionals anyway. Among Wall Street investors? Sure, who the hell wouldn't admire someone who can make people work over weekends and proud of it.
Also -- at the risk of doing a sexist no-no -- I can't help but wonder how someone like, say, Steve Ballmer, which I guess no one around here wants to do, would have been treated if he were the one treating his employees like this -- micromanaging exactly the people you shouldn't micromanage (i.e. the creative team), over a weekend, then bragging about how hip it is.
Breathing life into a company is a difficult task, and Marissa Mayer seems to be trying to do exactly that. Initial success is obviously to be applauded, but don't be overly enthusiastic. The smith's fire will eat through the coals and make the iron unworkable if you overwork the bellows.
> Yahoo looks like a big company, don't they have some CEO-ing to do? When you decide you want to make a career out of pushing papers and borderline lying to investors, stick to it.
Do you purposely have you head in the sand or haven't you heard of all the policy changes and various acquisitions?
Besides, branding is "CEO" type work.
> Initial success is obviously to be applauded, but don't be overly enthusiastic.
Hmm, let's see. In the past year, Yahoo!'s stock price is up 91.6%. That's pretty good "initial success".
Remember what happened before that? From 2007 onwards, Yahoo went through 5 CEO's.
Branding is CEO type work. Logo design isn't. Encouraging people to put all their resources into their work is awesome. "Jumping into the trenches" (oh, over the weekend!) isn't what the CEO of a multi-billion company does, it's what an arrogant, career-oriented boss who can't delegate does to compensate for his apparent lack of sufficient involvement.
Leading an agenda of technological innovation is also "CEO" type work, but would you like to do pair programming with the CEO (who hasn't worked on anything longer than a thousand lines in half a decade) on a Sunday evening?
> Hmm, let's see. In the past year, Yahoo!'s stock price is up 91.6%. That's pretty good "initial success".
That's one year. It's something well worth the "initial" mention. That's less than a fifth of the time Carly Fiorina spent at HP, and she also did a lot of important strategic moves.
"Jumping into the trenches" (oh, over the weekend!) isn't what the CEO of a multi-billion company does, it's what an arrogant, career-oriented boss who can't delegate does to compensate for his apparent lack of sufficient involvement.
That's absolutely ridiculous. Plenty of CEOs carve out a little time to jump into the trenches and work on things they really care about, or work on fun things to relax and get away from the big stuff for a little bit. Nothing about that says "arrogant, career-oriented boss who can't delegate and requires compensating for lack of involvement." May be Marissa Mayer thinks the logo is important enough to warrant her attention. Or may be she just wanted to work on something fun to get a break from the boardroom for a day or two. Or may be it's both.
Jumping to conclusions about someone you don't know based on a breezy blog post about a logo project seems far more arrogant to me than her taking a few days to work closely on this project.
> That's absolutely ridiculous. Plenty of CEOs carve out a little time to jump into the trenches and work on things they really care about, or work on fun things to relax and get away from the big stuff for a little bit.
Come on, read through the lines :-).
My post isn't to be read in terms of "Marissa Mayer is an arrogant, career-oriented boss"; it's my own experience there, and should be read in terms of "I've seen people do what she did, and they were arrogant, career-oriented bosses". Correlation doesn't imply causation; for all we know, it could be that she's a talented graphic designer with exceptional leadership skills, but I have my doubts on it.
That being said, Yahoo's logo change was a big move. It's the visual spearhead of their rebranding. That's hardly a fun thing you do to relax and get away from the big stuff, so that leaves important.
Leaving management principles aside, the polite thing to do when something is really important is generally to leave it to people who are good at it and not put unneeded pressure on them. The whole stream of action reeked of manipulation -- which, as it always happens, may not have been intentional, but that doesn't make it stink any less.
I am not being intentionally thick or judgmental based on nothing but a blog post. I am relating it to my previous experience, and definitely hope I am wrong (for the sake of Yahoo's employees, if anything).
1. Showing hand-drawn versions of your logo in what clearly is set in hardly-modified Optima (a typeface designed way back in the 1950s) makes me cringe. Why show fake process work?
2. No one is impressed when the manager does the job of their employees. For one, it implies that they don't trust their employees, and secondly, it makes the job of designers look like a fun hobby that anyone can get into. The result is exactly what happened here: an utterly boring logo redesign that looks just-polished-enough to make people think that Marissa Mayer is some kind of genius, yet simple enough to make people think that true designers bring no value to the table.
3. The whole 30 days of logos schtick was awful. Good artists know that the worst thing you can do for yourself is show too much of your own work. After a while, everything looks same-y and the weaknesses begin to become more apparent. The whole concept reeks of indecision and a pray-to-God moment that one of the logos would have such a huge outpouring of support that the Yahoo! team wouldn't have to make up their own minds on a vision.
4. The bevel isn't even customized. It's a preset Adobe effect. Pretending like the Y shape in the bevel was intentional is horseshit and obviously a desperate attempt to give some sort of conceptual significance to what is otherwise a completely forgettable design.
Totally right. That's why the design by consensus is always wrong. The brand is now biased. MM had a reputation of being intrusive even on silly details making the design process horrible and with crappy results.
From this I remember various things you may remember too:
1. The Google favicon. They did thousands and the one they choosed was crappiest one. They had to change it later.
2. The Google favicon with blue. Also, they did silly tests. Now that thing is gone.
I've been trying to evaluate this logo under the assumption that the people who are working at Yahoo are smarter than me and have more information than me.
My personal reaction is that I hate the bevel. Hate. I was rooting for #10, which is a simplified and modernized version of their old logo.
But. I'm not a Yahoo user. Period.
The bevel immediately made me think of some brands you'd find on sale at Macy's, which mainstream America associates with quality, but which my artisanal-y brainwashed brain thinks of as mass produced junk.
Imagine for a second that Yahoo has research showing normal people reacting to this logo with words like luxury and high-class.
If that's the case, then Yahoo just pulled an epic branding end run. Google, Apple, and Microsoft are fighting to be the flattest, plainest, more boring brands. Then Yahoo stepped up and said, "Yo. Let's be fabulous together!"
In the old days, Yahoo's skunkworks Brickhouse division had posters in their break room titled "Know your competition" with pictures of Bill Gates, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin. Trying to copy the other tech giants was (one of) Yahoo's problems because the Yahoo teams couldn't celebrate what they were actually doing well.
The contrarian in me salutes Yahoo for this crazy, out of left field, gaudy, off-trend logo. Genius.
I was rooting for #10 as well. The selected logo looks... cheap. When you can see the bevels they're distracting, but at typical resolutions (as on the home page) they get anti-aliased out leaving the edges of the letters looking fuzzy. You end up with an image that looks like it was improperly scaled.
I'm astounded they didn't hire an agency for this. Updating the logo for a major brand is incredibly specialized work and not something for which in-house talent is typically suited. They're too close to the brand to be objective and with an agency the power dynamic is better - they can fire the client if they're being dumb. I'm a fan of Marissa, but she should leave font and logo design to the pros.
The origin of a word has ZERO no relevance, how can it? May only French speaking countries be the places where the phenomenon of entrepreneurialism exists, with the phenomenon occurring only to smaller extents in other countries. Invention of a word does not give you the sole or even the greatest entitlement to its meaning.
American product logos typically employ more effects, like swirls, gradients, shadows, perspective, highlighting, etc. than European counterparts. My personal opinion is that they usually look better and more inviting. But not in the case of this logo. Holy hell does this logo suck in all sorts of ways.
> The bevel immediately made me think of some brands you'd find on sale at Macy's, which mainstream America associates with quality, but which my artisanal-y brainwashed brain thinks of as mass produced junk.
The only thing I can come up with is that someone, probably Mayer, thinks it's a hipster cool throwback to the late '90s when everyone was using Photoshop's default bevel and emboss filters like there was no tomorrow.
I feel like, if Meyer had been at this ten years ago, Yahoo would have just finished purchasing MySpace--Tumblr is just the modern-day equivalent. It's that kind of aesthetic, and that kind of audience, that they're reaching for here. (Meyer's own blog theme is a great example!)
For what it's worth, I like the bevel, because (probably due to the darkness of the colors involved) it somehow manages to be almost invisible at default zoom - if I just go to http://www.yahoo.com and look at the logo, even on a Retina display, it seems almost flat, with just a hint of varying color to spice it up. It's only when I look closely that the true depth is revealed. This adds visual interest... or I may just be blind. :)
I'd like to point out, for the record, that this "logo design team" consisted of:
- CEO
- SVP of "Brand Creative"
- VP, Creative Director
- Someone who doesn't seem to exist online, outside of articles about this new logo
- An intern
You'll notice a distinct lack of professional designers in that list. Apparently this 10 billion dollar brand wasn't important enough to put in the hands of, you know, experts. Instead, they spent a weekend (ONE WEEKEND) "geeking out" over it. Which is definitely the best way to design a global brand.
This is micromanagement at its very worst, and is an insult to the craft of design.
Hmmm, while I agree with the sentiment, I don't think it's as simple as putting it in the hands of a "professional".
Simply picking the right designer is something that requires an inordinate amount of taste to start with. People with no taste or feel for design stand a strong chance of picking a poor designer (or agency).
I'll cite Wolf Olins here as my example. Not only is it clear that no one in Wolf Olins seems to have taste or a feel for design, their clients don't seem to have it either. So there's a feedback loop of affirmation as people with no taste reward other people with no taste, which in turns makes other people with no taste think those other people with no taste have taste because all the people they know that they think have taste think those other people have taste.
Meanwhile, the actual people with taste are watching from the sidelines, because they've marginalised themselves by being honest about what is good design and what is bad design, but with a passion that comes across as pedantry and rudeness. So they watch in despair as the whole debacle unfolds in front of them, growing ever more frustrated which serves only to marginalise them even more.
While I'm here... I think almost everything Wolf Olins churns out is sub-stadard slop barely worthy of a fist year national diploma students portfolio. Their work has neither grace, finesse, or charm. It's all cack-handed indulgent arse-gravy of the highest order dipped in a seemingly bottomless ocean of post-rationalisation and I can not believe that people keep lapping it up. It's rank amateur. Their work stinks like shit and I hate them for it.
And there I go, proving my point about why no-one listens to designers.
It looks like a logo that I would create. My logo creation technique involves typing out the brand name, then selecting whichever stock font installed on my machine most strikes my fancy.
Perhaps the ratios of the bevels and font size contain some hilarious, hidden inside joke for mathematicians which I do not understand.
> We didn’t want to have any straight lines in the logo. Straight lines don’t exist in the human form and are extremely rare in nature, so the human touch in the logo is that all the lines and forms all have at least a slight curve.
This reminds me of the design team that tilted the Pepsi logo 10 degrees to show Pepsi was "leaning towards the future." [1]
Is there a rule that says you can't run a company if you see through these sort of lines as utterly laughable?
Well done - for a multi billion dollar company, spending a weekend on your logo is about the right ratio of time to value. Looks good enough to be acceptable, can be reused in all the sub projects. Done, now lets get on with real product improvements.
The main problem with this logo is that it sends conflicting messages. On one hand it wants to be funky (differently sized letters, tilted exclamation mark), but on the other it oozes conservative, with its square and straight typeface and lack of color. Overall, 'conservative' clearly beats out 'funky', with the few creative touches clobbered into submission. The larger Y and O, supposed to add dynamism and 'fun', are not different enough to pop and convey that idea. This is particularly jarring with the larger O next to the smaller one at the end - only different enough to confuse, not to send a message.
What's worse is the execution is poor and sloppy. It has no synergy. Notice the horizontal lines in the A and the H at strange 'close-but-not-equal' levels, neither tying into anything else in the logo. The flat foot of the larger Y sets one baseline, but the flat feet of the A and H define another, neither being referenced anywhere else in the logo.
Perhaps I just don't get it. Maybe the amateurism of it is the message, in which case it comes through loud and clear.
And yet, Neal Stephenson made an interesting distinction between "geeking out" and "vegging out":
"To geek out on something means to immerse yourself in its details to an extent that is distinctly abnormal - and to have a good time doing it. To veg out, by contrast, means to enter a passive state and allow sounds and images to wash over you without troubling yourself too much about what it all means."
Geeking out is a bit of a strange phrase to use with the logo. One can geek out on the details of the design, but the big problem (for me) with the logo aren't the details, it's the emotion.
While I'm sure I'll get used to the new design, it leaves me emotionally empty. I very much preferred the old one.
This might be contrary to what a lot of people here are saying -- I'm not sure adding a professional designer to the group would have made a difference.
You need to add the right designer. Not all designers are equipped to work in those situations, i.e., one who can deal with the huge personalities and egos of those on the redesign committee. And the worst egos in the room aren't always the CEO, they can often be the creative director types.
Other than GuiA's (currently-on-top) comment, almost everything I've read here is disgustingly negative.
"She's a micromanager, she should be 'CEOing' instead of designing, she's a terrible designer, she should spend time with her kids (!!), she has hubris to say she can design something, it's all about her, she's destroying the craft of design, the wafts of Denning - Krugerism are pluming out."
You can justify almost anything in design, it's so subjective and the person who gets paid the most always has the final say on what's "right" (except for a few unicorns that allow they're designers ultimte freedom)
This seems to be really well intended, but this is the outcome when you put a data-geek into charge of design instead of a true artist.
If they had just launched a design contest on a freelancer, they would have had a multiple times better results. Why not try a golden-yellow "Y" on a blue background for instance. Think different, play with the colors.
Design has to come from the heart and really reflect the personality of the company and show the LOVE! This yahoo logo still looks very stoic and still like from the 90s, urgs.
Designing is simply not a data-driven approach, it is the complete opposite.
Other design jobs for Yahoo properties? Or maybe they weren't part of the team beforehand? It's not like designers just sit there doing one thing forever.
Design by consensus = bad, really bad. If the CEO wears the designer boot and conditions the final art I think it's one of the biggest mistakes they will do. Right now, that logo to me looks like more or less those logos you can find on logotypes websites for 30 dollars.
The logo on smaller sizes looks pretty crap. Just check it. The logo is only interesting on certain situations, that's why a good logo isn't just drop some non-straight lines in illustrator on a weekend.
The pure typeface design is truely amazing and beautiful. The bevel and depth completely ruin the entire logo though. Yahoo should have gone with a flat design and a solid fill of their trademark purple color and called it quits.
Love the boldness. Going against flat is bold - and ugly.
It reminds me of a book I had in the 90s which showed 5-click Photoshop tricks, there was a golden bevel trick in there (and marble, and shadows, and stamping).
So, yeah, with all of this media around the new Yahoo I decided to attempt to re-embrace Flickr as a place to host photos. My old Yahoo email address account was long since gone, so I tried to sign up for a new account. On entering my Google Voice phone number (which I use as my official number everywhere, because it makes it way easier for me to switch carriers without worrying about number porting) as my mobile number their verification routine informed me it wasn't a valid mobile number... STRIKE 1.
So I get past that by entering my current actual cellphone number (which, again, I consider 'unofficial' since it may change 6 months or a year from now whereas my Google Voice number will not), which I had to go look up because I did not even know what it was... Annoying to have to do that, but not the end of the world.
I start uploading a set of 70 full sized photos to my first 'set' on Flickr over my not-so-fast DSL line. About an hour in to the upload, flickr informs me my login has timed out and the upload can't continue. Worse, not only did my overall upload not complete, but NONE of the photos in that upload show in my account despite the fact that the overall upload was about 50% done. STRIKE 2 through 71.
Yeah, nice-ish logo, even with the bevels, but until Yahoo fixes their shit, who cares? My impression of the company is actually much worse now than it was a couple hours ago when I was pretty much neutral on them. Needless to say my flickr experiment is over and I'm not likely to be signing up for any Yahoo services anytime soon.
It's obvious they missed the easiest way to simplify and modernize the logo... Drop the exclamation mark! Remember when Marissa had the TM removed? Nothing screams 90s more than an exclamation.
It takes courage to innovate. Ford, "They wanted a faster horse". Jobs, "They wanted a phone with a physical keyboard". Yahoo? The "new" logo doesn't signify that anything has changed.
Before reading this I felt the logo resembled the Google logo quite a bit in terms of the complexity of the font and the use of bevels, and felt like Marissa was involved and wanted to go for a familiar feel to that of Google. I feel its more likely after reading this considering who level in input.
Seriously, 31 comments about (a really mediocre if you ask me) LoGo? I'd only wanted to know how did it cost, out of curiosity... Because at eLance you can get a better one at 75USD without ruining a weekend (not joking).
Are they A/B testing the logo without the exclamation? About one out of 10 times I load yahoo.com the little animated ! never happens and the logo is left without the exclamation. Could just be bad code, though.
Until today, I believed Marrisa Mayer was all hype... she is a lady of attention to details - yahoo needs no other person her at this moment..
About the Logo, it seems so 90s.. normal people will be bored and you cannot explain the hyperbole's and the geometrical symmetry of the logo.. Yahoo needed a story that common man could understand - they have missed the train by designing a very technical logo.. I may be wrong, yahoo needs to attract technical people.. or I may be right with all the business happening at the consumer side.. they needed to balance - but they failed to do it..
> [...] they have missed the train by designing a very technical logo.. I may be wrong [...]
You may be correct though. What does the LOGO has to do with what Yahoo! will achieve is beyond me.
I like logo stories: Makes you think that if Nike didn't had the Just do it logo, it would have failed (and some kids in Eastern Asia wouldn't have to work their ass out for my Nikes).
Does anyone else here thinks the logo is much more feminine ?
It's more elegant, and the mix on bold and thin lines inside the letters reminds me a bit of fashion magazine logos ( think vogue).
That's my reaction as well. The person who described it as "Macy's" was spot on. My immediate reaction when looking at it is a department-store makeup counter.
Which is good branding, considering how one of Yahoo's strongest points is that they go after female market segments that geek-driven companies often fail to capture. They're chasing women. Not just women, but decidedly non-geeky women.
Remember that Yahoo's logo was originally red, not purple.
It seems weird to me that they went through so much trouble focusing on tiny details and then making the logo on the homepage so small that you can barely see them. I'm pretty ignorant of design theory though - can anyone recommend any reading materials (general, logo specific or other) that would provide a good introduction?
Focusing on the logo is a detraction from the vast array of truly positive changes that have been implemented over the past 6 months -- by some very talented teams I might add.
No question the whole site is on the move. To where or what, I dunno. But my interest is piqued and the overall experience feels tighter. If that makes sense.
Anything will be better than this. My guess is that they're fully aware that the bevel makes a lot of people think of the 90's. To me, the message is "stability" and "experience".
I have a feeling that final results - people like the logo most similar to the old one - were anticipated at yahoo, and entire logo testing situation "fabricated" to state "you liked us all this time, and we're just reminding you of that".
Its not a logo I would have made, but its different and it doesn't look _bad_. I appreciate the explanation she gave about the different aesthetics that went into it and how they tried to give it some deeper meaning then just a font on a white background.
I hate the bevel but looking at it on the Yahoo website when the logo is crushed into the top right corner the bevel makes it pop out a little more and be more noticable when it is that small the bevel pretty much disappears.
Logo is nice, it feels more modern. Chiseled bevel is a matter of opinion and would probably get removed on smaller scales (hopefully). I'd like to see them redesign their front page though. It's incoherent.
I'm not a designer and know nothing about logo design, so let me ask: Is there an objective way to evaluate a piece of design such as this new logo? Or does it just come down to personal like/dislike?
I'm sure there can be, somehow tying together intricate details how how our brains process visual data and how various associations are triggered.
I'm pretty sure no such process exists today though, which (at least to me) makes various statements that sound as if they were part of such an objective evaluation sound so hilarious.
Note: I have nothing but respect for the skills of good graphic designers, but it's just very strange to hear some of the justications made. My favorite regarding this logo was from the second bullet:
We preferred letters that had thicker and thinner strokes - conveying the subjective and editorial nature of some of what we do.
What does that mean? Am I supposed to look at the logo, and somehow conclude "ah, it uses both thin and thick strokes, naturally that is because Yahoo are sometimes subjective, sometimes they're editorial". Is "editorial" even the opposite of "subjective"?!
Well, what you can do is ask people who have worked with logo design, won awards for logo design etc.
Of course, these people may be biased, but at least they have more experience in evaluating logos than others. So in general, if many of them like it there's a good chance it's actually good.
The other thing you can do is to look back. In 10, 20 years, it might be more obvious whether a logo was successful or not. But again, that may be influenced by the success of the company.
I think saying that it all comes down to personal taste is bit misleading, because that personal taste is generally shared by a large part of the population.
"Well, what you can do is ask people who have worked with logo design, won awards for logo design etc."
"Of course, these people may be biased, but at least they have more experience in evaluating logos than others"
This just raises the question of how these experts evaluate a logo.
I understand that academic art criticism [1] has developed frameworks for evaluating works of art - genre, cultural impact, relationship to preceding works, etc. But a logo isn't art - it is almost entirely functional and used for (mundane?) concerns like brand identity. I can appreciate that some logs have existed for long enough that they have a historical context (e.g. Coca-Cola) but I don't see how this helps evaluate its primary purpose.
I'll say this again and specifically on this comment since it spells out "30 choices" while others just hint at it -
There were no 30 choices. This was always the final logo. The 30 prior "logos" were a "whimsical" way of getting users used to the idea of change. None of those 30 logos were done seriously...
Its even odder: she did get her full name (http://marissamayer.tumblr.com/). However, it includes a comment that points to http://marissamayr.tumblr.com/ (it says Please see marissamayr.tumblr.com for my blog.). No autoredirect, no link nothing. Quite odd.
Through these actions and posts, shes's showing how cool and fun Yahoo! is. Look, the CEO works on weekends with a small skunkworks team on designing logos, and nerds out on the subtle details like any cool designer would do.
This is all about making Yahoo! a desirable place to work at again. I'm receiving way more emails from Yahoo! recruiters these days than Google or Apple recruiters, and they all have a common tone: "check us out, we're fun!".
Similarly, all the small startup acquisitions have 2 goals: poach for talent, and get Techcrunch, HN, Engadget, etc. to talk about Yahoo. (the big acquisition we all talked about was about receiving a mature project internally as a way to make up for lost time)
Of course it's not just this that will bring Yahoo! to victory, but those little things show how much strategy there is in Mayer's execution.
EDIT: finally was in a situation where I could watch the video, and I only feel stronger about my point. Listen to the music (some dubstep/ibiza dance/feel good summer hit hybrid) - this is clearly destined to appeal to the 21 year old Stanford student looking for a new job, not the guy on HN who will criticize anything that makes it to the front page.